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Freddybear writes "A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Agency says that U.S. carbon emissions are the lowest they have been in 20 years, and attributes the decline to the increasing use of cheap natural gas obtained from fracking wells. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change. He said it demonstrates that 'ultimately people follow their wallets' on global warming. 'There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources,' said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado."

About 1/3 of carbon emissions comes from manufacturing, and most manufacturing is now done in asia.

And you don't think the Asians will seize upon the opportunity save money by adopting fracking techniques themselves? The west may be ahead of the curve with regard to petrochemical energy production but I really don't see any nation leaving money on the table.

Nah, they build Three Gorges and such. The US is about where London was when everything was covered in soot from coal stoves everywhere, while China is creating work projects like the US only did for a short period, and have been bashed ever since by "capitalists", though the results of those projects still stand and provide failure. Our modern bailout was billions for billionaires. The New Deal was millions for the unemployed (leaving behind thousands of completed projects still in use today). Apparent

Heard a story about Chinese attempts to begin fracking recently. The government in China is being uncharacteristically cautious due to environmental concerns. At least, that's what they are saying. I think they just don't want to have to pay us to do it for them.

"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources"

Sure, that's what everyone's been saying. The disagreement is over how to get there. Should we offer insurance guarantees for nuclear power plants? Should we mandate feed-in tariffs for household solar? Should we loosen restrictions on fracking? Should we increase science funding for alternative energy R&D? Should we institute a carbon tax?

"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources"

Sure, that's what everyone's been saying. The disagreement is over how to get there. Should we offer insurance guarantees for nuclear power plants? Should we mandate feed-in tariffs for household solar? Should we loosen restrictions on fracking? Should we increase science funding for alternative energy R&D? Should we institute a carbon tax?

So far, the strategy has been to cause all energy costs except those from "green" energy sources to, as Obama is famously quoted as saying; "necessarily skyrocket".

That's where I have a problem. Making "green" energy cheaper and more practical is a win and something I'd applaud, trying to force it by instead making everything else too expensive is stupid and hurts people, especially the poor, and the economy in general.

Yes to all! But for the fracking, heavy monitoring would be good, too. The point being that gas is bad, fracking dirty, but all in all a much better choice than coal.

But nuclear plants? Yes: it is the only carbon-free large-scale dense energy producing plant you can deploy anywhere. Feed-in tariffs for solar? Yes, you want as much solar as you can, because that forces the upgrading of the grid, and improves resilience. It is clean, too. Science funding? How can there be a debate. Is there any case of science funding which is a bad idea?

I don't understand how there is a disagreement: all of theses are possible, they don't contradict each other, and could be done simultaneously.

The market doesn't really care about lowering pollution, though, since pollution is an unpriced negative externality. Sometimes it'll favor more-polluting energy sources, and other times less-polluting energy sources, due to completely unrelated factors. So if you're waiting for the market to lower pollution without pollution actually being priced, you're just hoping for luck. Sometimes it does come along; the current cheapness of natural gas vis-a-vis oil is one of those instances. Other times it doesn't; the cheapness of coal is one of the other kinds of instances.

I wish I had mod points. This is one of the simplest explanations I've seen on the reality of this matter.

There are also those who will say that "an unpriced negative externality" is of no value whatsoever, since the only value that anything has is what the market assigns it. I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but I'm sure that many would salute if you ran it up the flagpole, especially if they're making money hand-over-fist making money that way.

The market doesn't really care about lowering pollution, though, since pollution is an unpriced negative externality.

It's quite well priced. Companies know there are legal risks, and they also want good relations with the communities they are in. They know the costs of cleanup of various materials, there's a ton of comparative data now.

It's a fallacy to claim that every company totally ignores pollution, many companies try to be responsible in this regard. You have to be or you generate a lot of bad pres

Note how the graph says "Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the U.S. from burning coal has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years".Is the data truly valid for *ALL* emissions, or as the graph suggests, just the ones from burning coal?

Kyoto was never about saving the Earth. It was about holding the US back so the rest of the world could catch up economicly.

You're half right. Kyoto was never about saving the Earth. Kyoto was about politicians pretending to care about saving the earth to improve their reelection chances by making promises that would be delivered far enough in the future that those making the promises could not be held accountable.

What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources

Or you could simply fix the original market failure [wikipedia.org] by adding the cost of emissions (a negative externality [wikipedia.org]) into the price of energy. To prevent this from burdening the poor, return an equal share of the revenue to everyone.

Or you could simply fix the original market failure by adding the cost of emissions (a negative externality) into the price of energy.

It's bizarre to claim you can "add the cost of emissions" to a product. How would you honestly come by such a figure, when there are myriad sources that can cause health issues (including people who smoke!)?

Would you equally burden supposed "green" sources of energy with the same costs, from the production of pollution in China when producing components?

How would you honestly come by such a figure, when there are myriad sources that can cause health issues (including people who smoke!)?

Well, we're not talking about any pollutant here, just greenhouse gases, and mostly CO2 when we're talking about energy.

I agree that it's not straightforward to establish a cost figure. So I guess one way to do it is set a goal of total emissions, run a few models to establish a tax amount that'd get you close according to those models and then run it in the real world and a

Why? CO2 is the ONLY emission that the biosphere of the entire planet is built around consuming.

CO2 is not pollution, in any sense of the word.

Rather than chasing after black unicorns based on the uncertain idea that possibly the earth MIGHT warm enough to cause any issues at all, we should address real pollution that effects real people living now.

That is the biggest crime in my book, people are focused on CO2 so much they are missing real p

Why? CO2 is the ONLY emission that the biosphere of the entire planet is built around consuming.

I beg to differ. Fixed nitrogen (mostly NOx) is another such emission, consumed by the biosphere whether in vapor or dissolved forms, from combustion by-products, sewage, or fertilizer run-off (especially fertilizer). So are Phosphates, found in detergents, fertilizer, and sewage (and of all major nutrients, possibly the most highly bio-concentrated in terms of the ratio between ambient environment and living organism). Unfortunately, while artificial applications of these nutrients are a boon to agricul

Or you could simply fix the original market failure by adding the cost of emissions (a negative externality) into the price of energy.

It's bizarre to claim you can "add the cost of emissions" to a product. How would you honestly come by such a figure, when there are myriad sources that can cause health issues (including people who smoke!)?

The fact that you can't price perfectly (particularly since there is no market here) doesn't mean you can't price at all. Right now, we price CO2 emissions at 0. For those who agree on the basic premise that CO2 emissions are a problem, 0 is obviously too low a price.

If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.

If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.

Agree to the premise, disagree to the conclusion unless you add a second premise that we have the power to price emissions uniformly across jurisdictions, or at least the ability to prevent substitution of emissions from one jurisdiction to the next.

If you increase the cost of emissions only in the US, the rational thing for emitters to do will be to substitute emissions somewhere else. A lot of steel gets made in China (with no pollution controls to speak of) and shipped to Europe (ironically, in dirty die

If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.Agree to the premise, disagree to the conclusion unless you add a second premise that we have the power to price emissions uniformly across jurisdictions, or at least the ability to prevent substitution of emissions from one jurisdiction to the next.

If you increase the cost of emissions only in the US, the rational thing for emitters to do will be to substitute emissions somewhere else. A lot of steel gets made in China (with no

Most international treaties have countries going along with the program without a central global power coercing their submission. I don't think it's unrealistic that the main producers of CO2 can get on board for a treaty "pledging" to locally tax CO2 emissions.

Are CO2 costs really be the main cost driver between European Steel and Chinese steel now? I'd doubt it. And I think it will be harder to get the US on board than China.

Since we also price most pollution at $0, the argument applies there as well. The difficulty of assessing total cost accurately should not be an excuse to pretend the total cost is $0, just as the failure to charge you for each exhalation should not be an excuse to charge a coal plant $0.

At worst it MAY raise global temperatures somewhat, making more land arable...Why do you think MAY?CO2 is a greenhouse gas like many others. Like the glass in a real greenhouse itnisncausing warming. There is no question about that, except the USA spread fud of the last 15 years.

You complain about several layers of bureaucracy in regards to raising one tax and lowering another, but you think that we can subsidize clean energy programs without bureaucracy?

The number one, best clean energy program is for individuals to use less energy. If energy were more expensive, people would do that naturally. No bureaucracy needed. The biggest failure of our current system is that it paints with too broad a brush. For example, fuel economy standards mean that we are pushing people who drive

We are running on overbuilt capacity from the 1960s. After that it became very, very expensive to build a large power plant - with most of the new costs being public protests and public comment sessions that turned into more and more evironmental impact studies. Often the result was the project was abandoned.

In Arizona and Illinois (both places I have lived) the solution was simple: build "peaker" plants that run on natural gas and build them up over time from 200MW to more like 1000MW over time. This still results in a lot of protest activity but governing bodies are far more likely to ignore protests when the plant has been safely and cleanly operating for five years or so when it comes time to expand.

The problem is that this is just a delaying tactic that will not solve the problem in the long run. Most parts of the country could use another 2000MW of capacity right now. Certainly if the economy recovers there will be considerable need for more and more electric power which today simply isn't available.

It is just barely possible today to build a data center that is independent of the grid but the costs for the battery storage are huge. Solar PV generation is constantly being touted as a solution, but the only way it is a real solution would be to have it on a lot of homes and other buildings - a lot meaning probably over 50% of them. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the grid problems at 5-9 PM when everyone gets home, turns down the air conditioner temperature and turns on the microwave and the washing machine. To fix that we are going to need capacity that doesn't depend on the sun and today's grid-tied PV systems do not address that at all.

One way out of the coming capacity crisis would be to have a big switch at the power company office: Day (offices) and Night (homes). This is literally what we might be facing soon. The problem is that we could easily have this kind of capacity problem in five years. It takes five years to build a new coal plant without any public opposition - and there would be plenty no matter where it was going to be built. It takes more like ten years to build a nuclear plant and we almost certainly do not have ten years before really running into a big capacity problem. We also need maybe 20-30 new plants coming on line in five years and we haven't even started building them.

The power companies really don't care. They will not be the enemy when you find your refrigerator doesn't run during the day and there is a new box that shuts off your house power whenever the capacity is needed. You can bet their PR departments and outside agencies will be working overtime to make sure someone else gets the blame.

But hey, if we don't build any new plants you can bet everyone will be shouting about how our CO2 emissions are down.

The solution is distributed solar. Solar pays back in under 5 years now with a lifetime of 20+. The only problem with solar is that the energy companies (almost all privatized now) see solar as a threat, so they continue to push the "it just doesn't work" press releases. Despite the fact they are all lies, people still believe, so long as it lines up with their personal philosophies.

Grid tied solar on homes would solve the power issue. Buy the dumped panels from China for the initial installation, and ramp up domestic production for replacement parts (as 20+ year life is good, but still means you need to replace about 5% per year forever). Distributed solar will take care of almost all our problems. We may end up with the (good) problem of more peak generation than demand, in which case we'd need to invest in some sufficient storage (China uses hydro storage, and it's quite effective - yes, I've been to Tien Shi and seen the production facility). Enough of that stable enough, and we could decrease baseline production.

Parent is correct. Distributed power is a THREAT to centralized power and that is one reason there has been zero interest in technologies that are disruptive-- it is like expecting Microsoft to support Linux.

If every house was partially covered in solar panels we would have a totally different situation that we do today. We wouldn't need wind or nuclear. There would be a demand for power STORAGE so instead of a nuclear plant you would have probably also centralized big corporations which sucked up your che

I keep hearing from conservatives that we can't do anything about climate change or reducing CO2. Natural gas has long been proposed as superior to oil because of releasing far less CO2. Fracking is dirty but we were producing plenty of natural gas before fracking. Fracking simply caused a glut and increased profits. Other factors like the reduction in driving mimics more efficient cars so we don't have to stop driving to make a difference. I just read we could offset all the cars just by grass feeding cows

I keep hearing from conservatives that we can't do anything about climate change or reducing CO2.

That is what you heard.

That's not what they said.

Conservatives have long claimed there is no need to spend extra money to reduce CO2. They said there would be no benefit in ham-stringing first world countries in many ways to reduce a gas that may not even be causing a problem.

And as it turns out, they were correct. If we had adopted Kyoto the U.S. would have a far worse economy than we have today, with many additional regulations imposed on businesses - when it turns out those additional regulations were never even needed.

Over time alternative energy WILL naturally overcome traditional sources just in cost benefit alone, there is no need to hurt the productivity of countries to make that happen.

Rhe countries that adopted Kyoto protocolls have far less economic problems than the USA. How do you explain that?Productivity has nothing to do with the way how energy is produced. It also has not very much to do with how much energy you use for producing something.The contrary is true. The more you produce for the same amount of energy *or* the less energy you use to produce the same, the more efficient/productive you are.

You must be very confused. Kyoto is about reducing CO2 emissions.There is no wealth transfere schema anywhere...The rest of yournpost isnutter nonsense... how much gasoline does a us car use? How much power does an US fridge use? How much power does a US washing machine use? How much time do you spend each month (and miles) to go for shopping?A typical USA household needs 3 or 4 times the energy an european does. That is neither efficient nor productive.Regarding your spain example, spain has no problems

"Over time alternative energy WILL naturally overcome traditional sources just in cost benefit alone, there is no need to hurt the productivity of countries to make that happen."
And as asked to conservative when will that happen ? The best answer I got was "when alternative energy are cheaper than oil and coal". The problem is, by that time we have burn so many of both that climate change might be irreversible and well going thru. The problem is that conservative lacks UTTERLY in insight, they see their ow

The USA are so keen on fracking because around 2006 the estimated total gas reserves of the USA (ready forproduction) was less then 10 times the anual consumption. Hence the USA stopped producing "normal" natural as and started importing, and now since a few years is doing fracking.I have no idea how big the 'frackable' resources are, but I would wonder ifnitnlasts 20 years...

I work at a coal plant. This year alone the overall power requirement for our area had been lower than the historical average. Yes, we did hit a peak generation record this year as well, but it's been a much milder year than normal.

We've also seen the cost of natural gas fall to the point where it was cheaper to leave the coal plants on standby and run the natural gas plants for the power demand.

50%? Seriously? *boggle* That's a serious drop. That's a huge drop, considering the population is the highest it's ever been. Or does your plant serve one of the areas that has lost population? Ohio and Michigan both have lost so much population over the past decade that they lost Congressional seats.

I remember reading an article many years ago - long before the global warming scare - that pointed out that moving to lower carbon fuels was a long-term trend. Industry started out with coal and charcoal, essentually pure carbon. Then it moved on to oil, which contains a mix of carbon and hydrogen. Natural gas was up-and-coming, with 1 carbon to 4 hydrogens. The article assumed that the future held nuclear and solar, both of which are essentially zero-carbon.

Aside from the hiccups with nuclear (justified or not, depending on your point of view), the article seems to have been pretty prescient.

You could go nuclear and avoid so much of it's proliferation and disposal drawbacks by going with liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTR's). But then again, if you wanted to create a big government pie-in-the-sky "make work" project, you could pursue fusion. Oh yeah, they're already doing that.

Except if you'd looked at the graph in TFA, you'd see that CO2 emissions by the US were pretty level for a good bit of the past decade, and appear to have started trending downward prior to the 2008 economic crash.

I'm sure the state of the economy has a role in this, but it's certainly not the whole story.

Additionally, the summary quote from Pielke may be a bit misleading when taken in isolation. In the article he also states that "Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the CO2 problem". I only mention this because most people won't bother to read the article.

I think you don't want to believe. The reality is that unless the anti-fracking lobby limits it's production, natural gas from shale deposits will be very abundant for a very long time. Not only that, shale oil deposits are massive as well. Likely big enough to push Peak Oil out a few decades in North America.

Shale of the centuryThe “golden age of gas” could be cleaner than greens thinkhttp://www.economist.com/node/21556242

Well there is more to the anti-fracking crowd than just people who want the prices to rebound. Fracking has it's own set of problems. [wikipedia.org]

I work in the energy industry and we do our fair share of fracking but our natural gas exploration group has started drilling for oil in the last couple of years to offset the low returns on gas. You can't stay in business if it costs more to acquire then you can sell it for.

My brother is running a natural gas fracking project, and, according to him, the only reason it was considered viable in the first place was because they projected a few years of getting oil (at what are historically high prices) in addition to natural gas. The project may be shut down because, not only has the price of methane dropped and stayed low, the prices of natural gas liquids like ethane, propane, butane, etc., have dropped to about 1/3 of their previous values. That is a story that's undertold

You do understand that they mine the cheapest, easiest to get at gas first, just like any other resource. The cost of production goes up steadily until it crosses the cost of something else. Then production slows or stops, always long before the resource is fully depleted.

Fracking itself is an excellent example, none of the stuff fracking can get to was considered viable to extract not that long ago.

Fracking is a bad example. We've been able to horizontally fracture oil wells for the past 50 years. It hasn't been much utilized because it is expensive. It was only when crude oil starting hitting $90 a barrel did it start to get popular.

Same with fracking natural gas - it's an economic rather than technical decision. Most of the major 'breakthroughs' in hydrocarbon resource extraction haven't occurred because of improved technology, but instead (largely) due to price increases.

Yep, there is a lot of oil and natural gas around. Maybe not so much relatively inexpensive stuff around. 'Cost effective' is an arguable point. If energy prices increase too much, the economies tend to fall off (as noted in TFA). We'd best hope that renewables get more reasonable fairly soon.

We've been able to horizontally drill for 50 years, but great improvements in drilling accuracy and well productivity have been much more recent. That said, if the price of oil and gas had not risen, it would still not be economical.

The article and title here are very misleading since they actually refer only to power production, not overall CO2...

While gas has advantages over coal, there are serious issues with fracking.

âoeThe oil and gas industry is a significant source of VOCs, which contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone (smog),â said the EPA in announcing new rules for drilling issued this April. The EPA said methaneâ"what natural gas is made ofâ"is a highly potent greenhouse gas. The agency blames o

It produces around 30-40% less CO2 than coal for the same power output. Coal is particularly bad, both in terms of CO2 production, and other kinds of pollution (though with currently mandated scrubbers it's not as bad a contributor to things like acid rain as it once was).

Natural gas also supposedly complements solar and wind better than coal because gas plants are cheap to build (so the amortized cost of letting them sit idle when cleaner sources are available) is less, and gas plants can adjust their output more quickly than coal (good since solar and wind are variable).

I have never heard it explained why gas plants are cheaper to build and more responsive than coal plants, so I'm curious if anybody knows.

Basically the same reason gasoline engines are far more efficient than coal-powered steam plants. Coal plants require more heat, for longer, to get sufficient burn, and require more overall metal cost to build. Plus the ramp-up time is hours, whereas the ramp up time of nat gas is very similar to turning on your car, excepting the huge generators would need maybe 10-15 minutes of ramp up time to get the oil flowing before you turn them full bore.

A big part of this is the advantage of modern natural gas power plants is the combined-cycle nature of their operation vs. the single cycle of coal plants. In a coal plant, burning coal heats water which turns to steam which drives a turbine that is connected to the generator. In a combined cycle gas plant, instead of just burning the gas for heat, they use the gas to power a turbine similar to one that you would find in a military jet engine. The turbine produces mechanical energy on its output shaft which drives a generator directly in addition to the hot output gas is also used to power a heat exchangers which boil water and makes more electricity in using the traditional method.

Would these supercritical thingies bring the US up to par?Seems that the power efficiency would be comparable, based on what you mentioned above."Ultra-supercritical plants have a thermal efficiency of 44% HHV, which is a 35% improvement over traditional plants."

"Itâ(TM)s anticipated that temperatures and pressures can be increased further, and that a thermal efficiency of 46% (HHV) can be achieved in the next several years.

GPE converts the coal into methane at a cost of $4-5/MMBTU. Right now, In America, the costs of natural gas at the wellhead is 2.5/MMBTU. In Europe, it is around $8-10/MMBTU (most is imported at that cost). In China, it is $20/MMBTU. As such, China has invested 1.25 Billion into GPE. Why? Because they are running out pipelines to where the coal mines are to pick up the generated natural gas. So, rather than ship the coal back 1000 miles, it is cheaper to simply convert it to methane and then pipe it back.

If you look at the article (it's not that long, won't take that long), they discuss whether the level of economic activity has changed because of the state of the economy. It makes it very clear that this has nothing to do with the state of the economy being in slow-growth.

And it's not the state of the economy is bad for everyone, you know? Luxury cars, yachts, diamonds, high-end houses and condos aren't doing all that badly, and in some cases are doing very very well.

And none of that has anything to do with whether Obama is a "foreigner", which he isn't, or a socialist, which he isn't.

While your complaints are valid, your anger is directed in the wrong direction, which makes you a dumbass. On top of this, you think Obama was born in Kenya or some stupid shit like that. Which makes you a birther. Which also makes you a dumbass of epic proportions.

No, I have listened and watched. I have heard talk radio from its modest beginnings here in New England, back when it was new through its eventual evolution to what it is now, and what I hear on the AM dial hurts my head. I used to listen to Limbaugh regularly back in the early 90s and he was entertaining back then, but he's just turned into an angry old man whose invective is wildly wrong and frankly coarse and offensive. I'm appalled by the pile of garbage talk radio has become. Hannit

It that isn't a trolling comment I don't know what is. Trying to tie Mann to a scandal in the football program. On top of that Mann has never been shown to be a liar. If his studies lead him to be alarmed about the potential for global warming to devastate our civilization shouldn't he as a leading scientist in the field voice his concerns?

And we should look into those treaties again. The Republicans made a wrong decision for not signing it. If they would have, we would have achieved it, and China might have grown slower meaning that there would be more jobs here in the US.

How do you figure that? Kyoto only held China to the standards of other 'developing economies'. But since they are our proxy for dirty manufacturing, all that would happen is more manufacturing would move there.

The only sane treaty holds everyone to the same standards. Granted, the third world points at us and cries about our record of consumption that put us in our current position. But the Chinese don't need to go through a phase of driving 6000 lb cars with tail fins to achieve what we did. Put them in